Excellent posting on anti-patterns.

SOA Anti-Patterns

Rails Performance Improvement suggestions

Interesting info. about major websites and they're experiences with databases:

Database War Stories

Very slick:

Ruby Syntax for Java Maps

Map options = new HashMap() {{
 put("key", "value");
 put("option", "foo");
 put("flag", "bar");
}};

Interesting article on XML gateways, authentication / authorization and XML encrypting, signing, etc. The author points out some good guidelines in regard to XML document signing and encrypting and whether simply HTTPS is sufficient.

Are XML Gateways really the answer?

Of course they should! If you become so detacted from the code how can you possibly make well informed decisions about the design and technologies to use for a system. Reading alone is no substitute for real experience.

Should Architects Code?

I really like these articles and fully agree, too much time is wasted in traditional methodologies focusing on formal project plans, Gantt charts, MS Project plans and then reviewing, and updating those plans. Agile retains the planning, but cuts out all the non-sense, since it rightly assumes things will change.

Planning 101 for Agile Teams

this includes the 5 steps from:
The Five Levels of Planning

Good read about continuations and how they can be applied to websites.

Continuations on the web

XFire 1.1 was released today

I'll be testing this version for the next few days and will post any thoughts or results when I have finished.

Wanted: An SOA Methodology

The Complete Guide to plugins for rails

Best howto for creating a simple web service with XFire.

XFire: The easy and simple way to develop Web services

“Is the underlying problem here that SOAP is hard? No. Its that integration is hard. If you think that REST/POX is going to make it easier you are just crazy.”

Yes, integration is hard

"It’s best to design your URLs without respect to how they will actually be implemented. Design them so they make sense to human clients and search engines. Then worry later about how you’ll actually implement the backend that serves representations of those URLs."


REST is like quantum mechanics

interesting post, light on details though:

SOA at Flickr and del.icio.us

Slick, gotta love sodoku:
Sudoku Solver

Plugins are really the way to go.

5 Reasons your next rails mod should be a plugin

Loose Coupling with SOA

"In technical systems, loose coupling carries an overhead - not just an operational overhead, but a design and governance overhead. Small-grained services may give you greater decoupling, but only if you have the management capability to coordinate them effectively. In sociotechnical systems, fragmentation may impair the effectiveness of the whole, unless there is appropriate collaboration."

http://www.veryard.com/so/2006/04/loose-coupling.htm

I like Ron Ten-Hove's perspect on SOA; it really shouldn't be this hard. There are still too many moving parts, too much exposed complexity and thus too many places for mistakes.

The Developer's View of SOA: Just adding complexity?


"Developers don't need to think like architects. They need to concentrate on smaller problems. Composition of what developers create into larger systems is a separate task."

"What SOA should be about is what I like to call invisible plumbing..."

The 13 commandments of IT development:

IT Commandment: Thou shalt loosely couple by ZDNet's Joe McKendrick -- Hard wiring processes should be a sin.

Interesting papers on Ruby and the enterprise. There are interesting comparisons between Java and RoR. Basically it points out that RoR really isn't ready to support service development, but shows its strengths for the front-end.

Nice library for doing "pop-ups" in the current browser window, over the current content.

DOMInclude

Interesting blog about RoR:

Why Ruby on Rails won't become mainstream

Good example of using FreeMarker to templatize emails:
Use freemarker to templatize emails

With FreeMarker's relatively light footprint and support already built into spring, how can you go wrong?

Interesting article on 12 best practices for Spring XML Configurations; this has been out for a while, but still good information.

Spring-xml-configuration-best-practices.html

Looks like W3C has standardized the XMLHttpRequest object:

http://www.w3.org/TR/XMLHttpRequest/

Ajaxian has more info here:

http://ajaxian.com/archives/xmlhttprequest-w3c-working-draft